Hokus Pokus

LEA Volume 18 Issue 3
Volume Editors: Lanfranco Aceti, Janis Jefferies, Irini Papadimitriou
Editors: Jonathan Munro and Özden Şahin

ISBN: 978-1-906897-18-5
ISSN: 1071-4391

Reference: Michele Barker and Anna Munster, “Hokus Pokus,” eds. Lanfranco Aceti, Janis Jefferies and Irini Papadimitriou, Leonardo Electronic Almanac (Touch and Go) 18, no. 3 (2012): 52-57.

Hokus Pokus
by Michele Barker and Anna Munster

Much of our creative practice has explored questions and issues asked and explored by neurology, from how we perceive to how actual brain damage affects our movement in and sensing of the world. HokusPokus developed in response to our most recent interest in enactive visual perception. We wanted to find a visually rich and accessible way to explore how we perceive actively in relation to and with our environment – how we see what we see and how this makes us ‘interact.’

Recently, neurologists have begun looking to magic in order to help make sense of some of most complex – yet fundamental – aspects of perception: why don’t we always see something right in front of us; why do our eyes more easily follow curved rather than straight gestures across space? There are no simple answers yet magic, which has explored such aspects of the visual for centuries, offered us a framework to explore these issues in a visually interesting way.

Full article is available for download as a pdf here.

Vol 18 Issue 3 of Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is published on line as a free PDF but will also be rolled out as Amazon Print on Demand and will be available on iTunes, iPad, Kindle and other e-publishing outlets.